August 26, 2014

Premiere: Big Mess' Pummeling You Are My Sunshine

We are pleased to premiere for you today the majestic and gritty debut full length from Lowell, Mass. and Boston-based trio Big Mess. You Are My Sunshine touts six monolithic instrumentals. And while there are no vocals on the three-year-old threesome's set, that does not mean its music is not lyrical. Indeed, the imaginative shifts from spare to saturated give You Are My Sunshine something like a narrative flow. We've seen the descriptors "doom" and "metal" tagged to the music of Big Mess, but the trio's writing is at once too melodic and too graceful to really fit those adjectives well. Sure, aesthetically certain elements of those styles are present here -- in Olivia Close's gut-rumbling bass and more generally the flattening weight of the act's favored mid-tempo battery -- but the more melodic passages of songs like "Headbone" and the playful (but poky) bounce to the curiously titled "Pounding Piss Touch" give the proceedings a pleasantly slack overtone, as well. The trio may be at its most thrilling as it pursues its most minimal tendencies: the final half of closer "New World Order Blues" works a totally sick, Shellac-esque groove with a single note repeated before returning through a tight feedback portal to an earlier motif.

You Are My Sunshine was recorded in July 2013 at Dead Air Space with Will Killingsworth, whose name we mention again here because we continue to encounter it in the credits of great records. This particular record will be released by Midnight Werewolf Sept. 16 in a limited edition of 300 multicolored 12" vinyl records; the set is also available as a digital download, and both the visceral and the virtual versions can be pre-ordered right now via the Midnight Werewolf Bandcamp wigwam right here. The threesome also intends to sell a self-released cassette version. Big Mess embarks on an ambitious month-long U.S. tour beginning Sept. 2, and all dates are listed below. At press time some of those dates lack a venue name, but we expect if you ask a punk in any of those various locales it won't take you long to ascertain the 20 of the show in your town. With all that said, we invite you to get your Tuesday off to an earth-shaking start by hitting the embed below and taking your first listen to You Are My Sunshine. Fans take note: despite the Sept. 16 release date, Midnight Werewolf tells us that Big Mess will have copies of the LP with them from the very beginning of the tour (WHAT UP ALBANY), so start saving those nickels.